John Wilkes, (born October 17, 1725, London—died December 26, 1797, London) outspoken 18th-century journalist and popular London politician who came to be regarded as a victim of persecution and as a champion of liberty because he was repeatedly expelled from Parliament. His widespread popular support may have been the beginning of English Radicalism.

John Wilkes, engraving from a manifesto commemorating his fight against general warrants and for …

Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

Early life

Wilkes was the second son of Israel Wilkes, a successful malt distiller. He was educated at an academy at Hertford and afterward privately tutored. His marriage on May 23, 1747, to Mary Meade, heiress of the manor of Aylesbury, brought him a comfortable fortune and an assured status among the gentry of Buckinghamshire.

A profligate by nature, Wilkes became a member of the congenial society of the “Medmenham Monks,” members of the so-called Hell-Fire Club who met occasionally in the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, to indulge in debauchery and the performance of Black Masses. In 1754, at the suggestion of Earl Temple, Wilkes stood for election to Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed—unsuccessfully, despite his bribing a captain to land a shipload of opposition voters from London in Norway instead of at Berwick. In 1757, after an election campaign said to have cost him £7,000, much of it in bribes to voters, he was returned to Parliament for Aylesbury. Recklessly overspending, and ever deeper in debt, he hoped to retrieve his fortunes by political advancement.

The North Briton.

In 1762, as author of a political newspaper, the North Briton, he began to give rancorous journalistic support to Earl Temple’s campaign against the ministry of Lord Bute, not hesitating to evoke popular English hatred for the Scots and to write libellous innuendos about Bute’s relations with George III’s mother. His incitement of antiministerial feeling was partly responsible for Bute’s decision to retire in April 1763. Temple, equally hostile to the new ministry formed by George Grenville, encouraged Wilkes to publish (April 23) the now famous “No. 45” of the North Briton, a devastating attack upon ministerial statements in the King’s speech, which Wilkes described as false. The new ministers, anxious to rid themselves of so vituperative a critic, and encouraged by the King’s personal animus against the traducer of his mother, instituted immediate proceedings against him. A general warrant (one that did not name the persons to be arrested) was issued. Forty-eight persons were seized in the search for evidence before Wilkes himself was arrested. He was thrown into the Tower of London, but a week later, to the public delight, Lord Chief Justice Pratt ordered his release on the ground that his arrest was a breach of parliamentary privilege. Wilkes and others instituted actions for trespass against the secretary of state, the Earl of Halifax, and his underlings that led to awards of damages and established the illegality of general warrants. Assuming his immunity, Wilkes prepared to continue his campaign. Asked by a French acquaintance how far liberty of the press extended in England, he said: “I cannot tell, but I am trying to find out.”

A second attack on him was now more carefully prepared by Wilkes’s former friend in the Medmenham set, Lord Sandwich, now secretary of state, who planned to strip Wilkes of immunity from prosecution by ousting him from Parliament. The government secured from Wilkes’s private press the proof sheets of “Essay on Woman,” an obscene parody on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which had been written by Wilkes and Thomas Potter years before. Wilkes had commenced, but not completed, printing 12 copies, probably for the “Monks.” At the start of the parliamentary session in November 1763, the essay was read by Sandwich to the House of Lords, who voted it a libel and a breach of privilege. At the same time the Commons, on a government motion, declared “No. 45” a seditious libel. During the Christmas vacation Wilkes, recovering from a wound sustained in a duel provoked by exchanges in the House, stole off to Paris to visit his daughter and decided not to return to face prosecution. On Jan. 20, 1764, the ministers carried the motion for his expulsion from the Commons. In February he was tried in absentia and found guilty of publishing a seditious libel (“No. 45”) and an obscene and impious libel (the “Essay”). Sentence was deferred pending his return, and in due course he was pronounced an outlaw for impeding royal justice.

For the next four years Wilkes pursued a profligate career on the Continent, chiefly in Paris, vainly hoping that a change of ministry would bring in friends who would secure him relief and advancement. The ministries of Rockingham, Chatham, and Grafton all failed him, and in 1767 his disappointments had led to a slashing attack on Chatham in his “Letter to the Duke of Grafton.” Early in 1768, in desperation, his indebtedness making a longer stay in Paris unsafe, he staked all on the hazardous chance of securing reelection to Parliament and determined to stand for London as an opponent of the government in the name of public liberty. The ministers, perhaps unwisely, failed to arrange his immediate arrest. Though defeated in London, he was elected for Middlesex, amid a rising tide of popular antiministerial fervour. At the end of April he gave himself up to the authorities, and early in June his outlawry was reversed on a technical point. Then, waiving his privilege as a member of Parliament, he submitted to sentences totalling two years in jail and fines of £1,000 on the two charges on which he had been convicted in 1764.

Having made this gesture he wanted a pardon and restitution, and he was ready to bully the ministers if he did not get them. In the following months he published inflammatory squibs against their use of the military against rioters, and he attempted to reopen the whole question of his conviction by a petition to the Commons complaining of illegality in the proceedings against him. The ministers once more secured his expulsion from the Commons on Feb. 3, 1769. The popularity in the metropolis of his stand against the government ensured his reelection for Middlesex on February 16, and again on March 16 after a further expulsion, regardless of a Commons’ resolution that he was incapable of being elected to serve in the present Parliament. After a last reelection, on April 13, the House declared his defeated opponent, Henry Luttrell, the duly elected member. Wilkes was finally expelled on inconclusive precedents and by a method undoubtedly fraught with danger to the constitution, since it set aside in the name of parliamentary privilege the right of the elector to choose his representative.

Career in London

Friends and sympathizers of Wilkes early in 1769 formed the Society for the Defence of the Bill of Rights to uphold his cause and pay his debts. During 1770 it became a political machine at his command. Shut out of Parliament he pursued his ambitions and his vendetta with the ministers in the City of London, becoming an alderman in 1769, sheriff in 1771, and lord mayor in 1774. It may be that expediency rather than principle made him embrace the radical program adopted in 1771 by the Bill of Rights men, which called for shorter Parliaments, a wider franchise, and the abolition of aristocratic “pocket boroughs.” In 1771 he successfully exploited the judicial privileges of the city to prevent the arrest for breach of privilege of printers who reported parliamentary debates. As a magistrate of the city he frequently showed himself to be conscientious and enlightened, though he remained characteristically irresponsible in financial matters.

Reelected for Middlesex in 1774, after pledging himself to the radical program, he spoke on a number of occasions against the American Revolutionary War and once (1776) in support of parliamentary reform. He soon acquired a reputation for insincerity and was reported to have admitted that his speeches against the ministers were solely to retain his popularity in London. From about 1779 his popularity noticeably waned. In 1780, during the Gordon Riots against Roman Catholics, he took firm action to put down the rioters, from whom a few years before he had been glad to receive support. In Middlesex he remained popular, being reelected on his radical platform in 1780 and in 1784. In 1782 the expunging from the Commons journals of the resolution of 1769 against him vindicated his defense of the rights of parliamentary electors. After 1784 the issues that had made him popular were cold, his fire was spent, and in 1790 he found so little support in Middlesex that he declined to fight the election. He died in London in 1797.

Character.

Wilkes was extremely ugly, with a hideous squint, but had a charm that carried all before it. He boasted that it “took him only half an hour to talk away his face” and would declare that “a month’s start of his rival on account of his face” would secure him the conquest in any love affair. He had a gift for the bon mot: once during his fight with George III’s government, when invited to make up a table at cards, he replied: “Do not ask me, for I am so ignorant that I cannot tell the difference between a king and a knave.” Sandwich’s laughing assertion that Wilkes would die either of the pox or on the gallows brought the lightning response: “That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.” When one of his city associates lost patience and declared in a rage, “I’ll be your butt no longer”—“With all my heart,” said Wilkes, “I never like an empty one.” Loaded often with malice, his jokes told against his enemies but also lost him friends. As an opposition journalist and pamphleteer he was hard-hitting and incisive, but he lacked either voice or talent for debate in the House of Commons. His real achievement lay in extending the liberties of the press. His challenge led to the court findings that general warrants as hitherto used by government against the press were illegal, and he effectively destroyed the power of the Houses of Parliament to exact retribution for the reporting of parliamentary debates.

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